According to the spec, blank lines in message catalogs or lines
beginning with '$ ' are valid comments.
However, there were many cases where lines in the message catalogs
contained just a single '$', without the required space after it.
Under linux, this caused 126766 error lines (in my builds) of the
form:
... unknown directive `': line ignored
This also causes gencat to exit with a non-0 exit code. Even though
gencat says it ignores the line, it really doesn't.
An early porting change to programs/localized/util/merge.c was made to
ignore this return value on linux. This hack has now been removed.
Build logs are a lot smaller and cleaner now.
chase